Suggestion for a system that would help smaller groups

[ave26 20]

First of all I want to say English is not my native language so I apologize if there are some mistakes.

I'm in a group with 3 friends at the moment, it was more but due to how unforgiving the game is, they have quit. Even those two don't play as much so I'm mostly solo on EU PVP (more than 200 hours).

We reached and asked some of the companies with land to give us a small place to live and tax us but we got refused every time for different reasons. It was mostly "merge or leave". We gave up on that and settled on lawless island which is fine with me except the part  where I keep losing ships while offline, even with npcs on cannons and swivel gun armed with liquid flame.

So as a mostly solo player my biggest issue atm is having to rebuild schooner over and over again and even with 2x harvest it takes some time. This made me think how to help solo players and small groups without helping bigger ones even more. 

- There are 2 ways of doing this. First you could give a harvest buff based on a company size. For example, if your company averaged less than 5 members in the last 3-5 days you get 20% harvest buff, if it's in between 5-10 members you get 10% buff, for 10- 20 - 5% buff. This would help smaller companies a lot to rebuild and not immediately quit the game after they lose their first brigantine that took days to build, while they were offline. Of course, these numbers could be modified at any time to improve the balance. 
 

- Or alternatively the same thing but by reducing the ship costs of everything bigger than sloop, using the same system depending on the company size. For example, it costs 20% less mats to build a schooner if u're in a company that averaged less than 5 members in the last 3-5 days. 

 

In my opinion this  would converge the gap between companies without hurting big companies and not giving too much power to small ones. Big companies would still build ships super fast and smaller ones would still care about their ships enough not to grief big companies.

Also to prevent abusing the system there could be some kind of cooldown period to join another company after u left one. Let's say you cannot enter the new company for 24hours after leaving.  This combined with average number of members in last 3 to 5 days should prevent the abuse from big companies.

 

To all of you who will say "just git gud or join the big company" - I understand your point of view but it's just not gonna happen as you can see on stream charts. Most people chose to simply leave the game instead of looking for a big company they would MAYBE enjoy. I live on a lawless island and 90% of small groups just quit the game after they ship/s got sunk during the night.

Edited January 18, 2019 by ave26

[Coggage 239]

That's what Unofficial servers are for, and why so many people use them.  Land to build on, Admins who don't take crap from griefers, a lot are 16 servers with plenty of Islands and Biomes.  Official servers are not fit for purpose at the moment.  Overcrowded, toxic, full of bugs and exploits  and with no Admins who do anything about it,

[Razorwire 15]

3 hours ago, ave26 said:

... 

-... give a harvest buff based on a company size. For example, if your company averaged less than 5 members in the last 3-5 days you get 20% harvest buff, if it's in between 5-10 members you get 10% buff, for 10- 20 - 5% buff. ...

- Or alternatively the same thing but by reducing the ship costs of everything bigger than sloop...

In option one, mega tribe gives access via PIN to a materials drop box, and their mate or 2nd account builds the cheap ships from the large company's gathered assets. Ships are then 'stolen' by the large company for PvP use.

In option two, mega-company farmers split off into smaller 3-5 person companies to gather, using tools and tames supplied by parent company to harvest using the buff.

Offline protection or raid timers is a better solution, I think.

Edited January 19, 2019 by Razorwire
Clearer wording.